Dry instant food mix compositions have been used by consumers for many years. Such foods include sauces, gravies, dips, and desserts. An object of providing such convenience foods is to provide the consumer with a product that reduces the time and ingredients used in preparation of a ready to eat food. Such foods generally require ingredients that thicken, gel or otherwise increase the viscosity of the prepared food.
It is desirable to use starch as the viscosity control agent in such foods because of economics and availability of starch products. A limiting factor in formulating dry instant food mix compositions is the poor dispersion characteristics of instant starch products. Stabilizers and thickeners such as starches that are commonly used in dry mix instant food mixes such as desserts are usually extremely hydrophilic. That is, they tend to very quickly absorb water. Generally, the stabilizers and thickeners are diluted with dry bulking materials such as sugar to allow proper dispersion of the dry mix into liquids. In most cases, if sugar is removed from the composition for caloric reduction purposes, most powdered, instantized stabilizers will fail to disperse completely, leaving objectionable entrapped dry particles or "fish eyes" in the finished dessert product.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,504,512 issued Mar.12, 1985 to Danielson, et al. points out the problem of dispersibility of dry pudding mixes. In the claimed dry pudding mix composition a bulking agent such as sugar is required to aid in dispersing the ingredients and promoting rapid mixing free of lumps. When artificial sweeteners are used in this composition, suitable non-sweet bulking agents are required.
Consumer interest in low calorie convenience foods has encouraged development of reduced calorie versions of traditional food products. Desserts and puddings are no exception for such efforts.
Puddings and dessert products are starch based products that gel or set to a thickened mass. Examples of such desserts are lemon, lemon meringue, coconut cream, chocolate, vanilla, banana cream puddings or pie filling and the like. These desserts are characterized by having a pleasant smooth eating texture while also possessing sufficient strength and rigidity.
In typical recipe preparations of traditional dessert products prepared by cooking (boiling) a mixture of sugar, starch and water or milk (together with flavorants and/or colorants and other additives peculiar to the particular dessert in question as, for example, the use of egg in lemon puddings to contribute to the unique texture thereof), during which process the starch granules undergo progressively increasing stages of water absorption, swelling and loss of birefringence, along with leaching out of soluble portions of the starch. The aqueous mixture increases greatly in viscosity and, upon cooling sets to a firm gel structure.
The convenience form of a dessert product of the starch-based filling type is predicted upon the provision of a dry filling mix containing the full complement of sugars, starch, flavorings, etc. which can be admixed with water or other aqueous medium and cooked to provide a filling which can be poured into a serving dish or a pie shell and which will set upon cooling.
It has been perceived as desirable to provide the consumer with a mix, preferably reduced in calories, which can be reconstituted to form a thickened or gelled starch-based filling without any need for cooking, i.e., using ordinary tap water, cold water, cold milk or the like.
The carbohydrate or sweetener components of dry mixes are logical targets for calorie reduction. In general this means decreasing the amount of sugar or other traditional sweetener in a given weight of dessert mix. Ideally, high intensity sweeteners such as aspartame, saccharin and the like would be used to completely or partially replace sugar in instant dessert compositions. The reduction of carbohydrates by replacing sugar with high intensity sweeteners causes problems in formulating products that have the desired texture.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,262,031 issued Apr. 14, 1981 to Carpenter et al discloses a process for preparing a cooked pudding composition containing a highly-dutched cocoa. This patent discloses a dry pudding mix containing 25-98% starch and a variable amount of sweetener. However, this is a cook up pudding rather than instant pudding. U.S. Pat. No. 3,914,456 issued Oct. 21, 1978 to Norsby et al discloses a dry mix pudding composition comprising about 70-88% sucrose by weight of the dry mix composition, about 3 to 9% pregelatinized waxy maize corn starch and about 11 to 19% pregelatinized tapioca starch by weight of the dry mix.
It is an object of this invention to provide a substantially dry instant food or dessert mix composition that is predominantly starch and can be readily dispersed in cold liquids.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a method of making a ready to eat food from a dry instant food mix composition.
It is a further object of this invention to provide an instant dry mix pudding composition comprised predominantly of starch in combination with a high intensity sweetener.
Further it is an object of this invention to provide a dry instant dessert mix composition which has at least one-third fewer calories per standard serving than traditional dry instant dessert mixes.
Other objects and advantages of this invention will become apparent by reference to the following specification.
Throughout the specification and claims all ratios and percentages are stated on a weight basis and temperatures are in degrees Celsius unless otherwise indicated.